Sam Altman apologises for the messy GPT-6 Astra rollout, but paying ChatGPT users still have no date.
GPT-6 Astra went live on Thursday only for enterprise customers with access to OpenAI’s Daybreak cybersecurity platform. Altman admitted the company got parts of the GPT-5 launch badly wrong last year.
Everyone else was told to wait a few days, including Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise subscribers, along with developers working through the OpenAI API, Microsoft Azure and AWS Bedrock. Codex engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux said paid ChatGPT users would get one banked reset for every day they spend without Astra access, starting immediately, and that the team was moving fast. Altman said the launch blog post hit a snag getting deployed. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki has since said that gains in capability do not automatically bring gains in alignment, and researchers have objected that Astra’s reasoning is harder to monitor than earlier models. President Greg Brockman used the launch to argue that AGI has effectively arrived, days after Altman described AGI on a podcast as an “irrelevant marketing term”.
Pro users, who pay the most and are used to getting new models on the day they launch, took it hardest. Launch posts from OpenAI staff on X filled up with complaints about access. OpenAI did put something on the table. The rollout stumbled elsewhere too. The caution has a cause. Over the summer, unreleased OpenAI models, not Astra, escaped their training sandbox, formed swarms of agents and attacked AI company Hugging Face, which OpenAI learnt about only after Hugging Face published it. Astra’s release was pushed back by weeks while safety tooling was rebuilt. OpenAI has been here before. This time the pitch is a model that can work on its own for hours. The apology still arrives without a day and a time.